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Deviance B

Deviance B Week 12 - Sexual Deviance

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  1. Helmut Puff, ‘Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherine Hetzeldorfer (1477)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History, 30 (2000), pp. 41-61.

     

    Helmut Puff’s article focuses on the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer in 1477, who was charged for sexual relations with numerous women. The court investigation was predominantly concerned with how Hetzeldorfer was able to embody a masculine role. Puff argues that it was the fact that she infiltrated the ranks of men by dressing as a man and by appropriating a phallus that made her a victim of harsh retribution. The trial took place in late medieval Speyer, where there was increasing anxiety about cross-dressing, as seen in the fact that the magistrate prohibited women from wearing men’s clothes, and later, men from wearing women’s clothes. Her highly visible execution, which involved drowning, reinscribed the ‘right’ gender on her body, and therefore publicly legitimised urban rulers in their attempt to ensure a supposedly natural order of creation. As one of the earliest examples of the punishment of lesbianism in the secular realm, Puff claims that the trial inaugurated an era in which women who engaged in sex with other women were at times severely persecuted.

    Puff coins the term ‘female sodomy’ as an attempt to rectify traditional historiography which suggests that sexual relations between women in the late medieval and early modern periods were too few to merit any significant historical attention. According to Puff, the term characterises a range of significations beyond the transgression of the sexual order and it usefully provides insight into the precarious domain of emotions, passions, and desires. It also intends to reveal those highly significant moments when knowledge of female homoeroticism was penetrated in the male sphere; in these encounters, female homoeroticism was cast in masculine terms.

    The courtroom was the principal location where same-sex practices were articulated in the medieval period. It is in such court records that the secular authorities represented verbally what was normally considered unspeakable. Basing the article on such a document is certainly useful, because the intersection of moral, legal and sexual discourse provide valuable insights into pre-modern constructions of sexuality and the gradual fashioning of a vernacular discourse on sodomy. However, it is limited by the fact that it does not provide insight into a comprehensive range of what female homoerotic relations what have meant in pre-modern society, since it primarily reveals male perceptions about women who engaged in sex with other women.

     

     
  2. S.R. Falkner, ‘“Having it off” with Fish, Camels, and Lads: Sodomitic Pleasures in German-Language Turcica’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13 (2004), 401-27

    The article studies how the sexual behaviour of Turks were depicted and described by the European authors of Turcica. The word Turcica refers to a wide body of texts and literature about the Turks or more widely all the Muslims. It encompasses different genres as novels, poetry, religious treatise, published from the 15th to the 17th centuries. After a presentation of its sources and its argument, the author, to demonstrate his point, analyses several scenes of sexual deviance and how these latter are described and presented to the reader.

    Falkner argues that these texts, in describing deviant sexual practices, were part of a rhetorical discourse of Catholics as well as Protestants against the Turkish threat, more and more perceived from the fall of Constantinople. And although it was mainly directed against Muslims, the authors notices these texts were used to defame the Christian adverser a well, Catholic or Protestant. Thus the author points out the hyperbolic use of sexually charged image supposed to bring about shameful and bellicose feelings to the readers. By producing a knowledge about deviant Muslim sexuality, the authors defamed Islam and presented it as a deviant religion.
    But the analyse of Falkner is interesting because it is not limited to the primary goal of the German authors. He intends to grasp the reaction of the contemporary readers as well. For this purpose he uses different level of analyses, among which a Freudian approach of several description for example. By studying the vocabulary but also the gaze of the reader, the author notices the ambiguity that could cause some texts. According to him there were a “self-contradicting” ambiguity in these texts their contemporary authors were aware of. Indeed, they had to detail the descriptions enough in order to be understood and efficient but with the risk of encourage the pleasurable imagination of their reader. The boundaries between denunciation and eroticism were sometimes overlapping.

    The sources chosen, according to the author, have never been studied for their description of sexuality. They are often depicting common places about Turkish and Muslim sexuality hard to consider as depiction of reality, but the analyses of the historian on different level makes it very indicative of the mentality and the intentions of European contemporaries. And if Christian norms appears clearly through the description and defamation of the Other's sexuality, the ambiguity pointed out by Falkner shows that the settle norms were not always respected or representative of the actual practices. Hence the Freudian approach of some scene might not be always relevant when applied to a pre-modern reader, the authors has the merit of proposing a different and innovative approach of the texts.

     

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